


the houses of heaven fall around us

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Related, Kimono, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pre-Road Trip, Ritual Sex, Sacred Marriage, but take these swords and bash down the canon, going off the lore that Prompto's got some different kind of magic in him, or at least not actually unrequited attraction, or at least the Lucian equivalent of, take these swords and smash down the Astrals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 10:35:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16093922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Fresh from an altercation in the streets of Insomnia, Prompto gets himself called to the heart of the Citadel on an urgent summons from Noctis.Exactly WHAT that urgent summons is, however, he doesn't know until he's right in the thick of it.(Noctis DOES ask him for permission.)





	the houses of heaven fall around us

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my dear [Shadi](https://twitter.com/JunkyardSHADi): it's not quite NSFW but it DOES skim the borders.
> 
> Also, this is my ffxv anniversary week proper :)

“One for the road,” he says, and he’s more grateful for the cold beads on the bottle of iced tea than he is for the taste of the drink itself, because he’s had better, or at least he knows how to get by on a few precious spices and a tin box of high-quality tea leaves -- but he downs the contents and slides a few extra coins onto the snack bar’s counter, to pay for the cost of the glass he’d accidentally broken when he’d first lurched in.

At least he can still walk, he thinks: though it’s warm and the uniform he’s wearing, which isn’t quite Crownsguard-trainee fatigues, leaves him sweating and breathless, not to mention the torn fabric below his right knee keeps catching on the long scraped wounds all the way down to his ankle and he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t wind up aggravating his injuries. 

But he can walk and the delinquents whom he’d caught trying to kick a poor mama-cat and her newborn kittens outside the snack bar -- can’t, and won’t be doing so for a bit. He’d seen to it personally that they’d been loaded onto stretchers to go into some kind of custody -- and then he’d turned over the improvised weapons they had carried and he had nicked off of them, to none other than Monica Elshett.

“And you?” she’d asked, eyes narrowed and dangerously knowing.

“Eh, nothing a bath and a day’s sleep won’t fix,” he’d caroled -- and she hadn’t looked convinced, but then she’d nailed him in the back of the head with a small potion and he didn’t even have the heart to pretend to be ungrateful in return.

He’s pretty much the opposite, even if there are drops of blood on his knuckles, dripping onto the sun-baked pavement beneath his feet.

He drags himself back to his little house and -- looks around in the kitchen cabinets for an actual first-aid kit. 

Getting into and out of the shower is a certified pain in the ass and he doesn’t know how he manages it -- and he all but falls into bed, and the knots on the bandages are clumsy. Tight in some places and loose in others, and all those places are wrong, and he face-plants into his pillows and groans -- 

“Wark!”

Not quite a chocobo cry, or maybe it’s the cry of some other bird, and Prompto swears this time, and reaches for the phone. “H’lo.”

“Argentum, you’re wanted at the Citadel,” and the voice must belong to someone in the Crownsguard but he can’t for the life of him remember which one, and he doesn’t even get the chance to protest when -- the doorbell rings.

“Top the bill!” he yells, hoping the password carries, hoping he can hear the right counter-phrase.

“Overkill,” is the muffled response.

“Shit,” and he pulls his bloody shirt back on, makes sure he does up his flies, stomps into his boots and doesn’t bother to tie the laces, before opening the door.

Two women on his doorstep: one of whom rolls her eyes.

Flash of crystal-blue magic, that tastes like a rolling storm on Prompto’s tongue -- quickly replaced by a cool rush sizzling down his nerves because she’s broken another potion on his bared forearm and he sighs and shakes his head and says, “Next time don’t bother, please?”

“Nah, it’s more than our lives’re worth to go against the Crown Prince’s orders,” the woman on the left says, and she doesn’t elaborate, just motions him into the waiting car.

Another Crownsguard at the wheel, who revs the engine as soon as he’s closed his car door, and -- the city literally flies past with the speed at which he drives.

“You in a hurry?” Prompto asks, but only after they’re waved through the first of the security perimeters surrounding the Citadel.

“Not me,” the driver says with a shrug.

So Prompto blinks and fishes out his mobile phone and sends: _What’s the rush?_

The response he gets is not an answer to the question; it’s an image, and he’s seen something like it before, and he has no idea where this one is going to lead him. Some kind of pixel-coded thing, which he knows he has to hold up to the readers in the elevator that’s -- wide open and waiting for him, once he’s through the doors marked with the Crownsguard badge.

No one gets into the elevator with him, not even when the display ticks up and up and up; and there is no one on the landing, when the cabin finally opens up again.

And it’s a long corridor to walk, when he’s already maybe a little worried because Noctis still isn’t answering him -- and none of the others are picking up, either, and he’s catching his breath and trying not to panic when he passes a half-open door, movement in the shrouded low light that’s barely enough to see by --

He tiptoes in: it’s a long room he’s entered, one in every three lanterns lit, hanging from the ceiling on utterly still chains -- and that’s barely enough light to see the figure walking away from him, toward a different and smaller throne, and Prompto can’t help but shudder when he sees the too-realistic skulls picked out in silver and gold, on the canopy, and on the low slab of a table set out before the seat.

What was it with Lucis and skulls, seriously, and he nearly mutters something entirely blasphemous under his breath -- gets as far as the sibilants in the first syllables when the figure that had been on the move says, clear and carrying:

“I swear this on my mother’s blood that you took from her. I swear this on my father’s strength that you’re turning into dust. I swear this on my uncle’s tears that you corrupted, and I swear on the Oracle’s grave because she told me the truth: you chose me and you’ll regret it. You chose me and you’ll pay. I swear this on my family’s bones. On my own.”

Thunderclap, icy-frosted bolt of lightning -- 

Prompto’s frozen to the spot as the figure who can only be Noctis jerks upright into some kind of terrifying contorted figure, an agonized arch, lifted clear off the floor in magic that glints like the scales of a beast. That devours the light in the room and throws it back into sword-edges.

Noctis doesn’t scream, even when the magic twists him, horrific: and even as he contorts, hands hanging down, he laughs and sobs at the same time -- and the words he says echo and echo and seem to lodge right in Prompto’s skin. 

“My family will be freed of you, now and after!”

Voices, swallowing Noctis’s, like the very wrong kind of prayer, like strangling chains clashing -- 

“Noct!”

How Prompto gathers the breath to shout, to fight against those terrible words he can’t even understand, he doesn’t know -- all he knows is this, that one moment he’s standing by the doors and the next he’s leaping up and up, some idiot prey-notion of trying to bring Noctis back down to the actual ground -- floor -- beneath their feet, and it’s like throwing himself into a furious tempest, invisible claws and cold raking at him and he screams, reaches for Noctis and rolls him into his arms, rolls them both down in the blind hope that his friend will land on him and not on the floor --

And he’s still shouting, groping for the words, and when they come they taste like blood: “You’ve broken him enough! Leave him! Let him live! Let him be free!

“Take me if you have to have someone to break -- then break me!”

“NO.”

He should have flinched: that voice, that single powerful word, so close he can feel its passage, its power, brushing his skin.

He doesn’t: instead his eyes meet Noctis’s -- and for a moment those midnight-blue eyes flash red, then gold. For a moment he seems to be wearing a mask of thick tar-black tears. For a moment he smiles like ravening shadow-beasts.

And then they’re landing on their feet. Noctis is flinging his right arm up over his head, palm upwards, and Prompto, drawn to the movement and the hectic powerful light in his eyes, catches sight of something shaped like a ring, shattering slowly, falling to pieces, floating above Noctis’s hand.

So he grabs Noctis’s free wrist in both hands and kisses it over the junction of dark veins and sinews. 

It’s not a gesture he’s read about or heard about -- it’s a gesture he just knows, like it’s an instinct of some kind, buried in his flesh and bones for maybe just such a moment like this -- and something rushes out of him, leaves him on frantic wings and the next thing he knows, the ring-shape is wrapped in golden light and -- crack, far too loud, like thunder right against his skull.

The ring-shape shatters.

And Noctis laughs, for one beautiful moment, before he crumples in on himself.

Prompto snatches him closer, and all the breath is driven from his lungs when Noctis hits his chest in the half-second after Prompto himself hits the floor, cracked and cratered and crumbled.

Not that the pain screaming through him for the second time today can stop him from curling around Noctis. 

He doesn’t know what’s been going on and he really doesn’t care: all he cares about is sheltering Noctis.

Who breathes against his chest, against his heartbeat, the wound in his back bleeding but only sluggishly.

More worrying are the holes driven into his wrists, clean and not even bleeding, but Prompto shudders the moment he clocks that _he can see through Noctis_ in those places and he curses the lack of a jacket, the lack of sleeves, something to cover up those opened spaces in his friend, in his Prince.

Sob of warm breath against him, Noctis stirring, and he mutters, “I need to get you help, I need to find the others -- ”

“Not, not yet done -- wasn’t expecting to get this far -- ” Slurred words. “I, there’s something else, but -- Prom?”

“Yeah?” He clutches at Noctis’s hip, at the back of his neck. 

“Where did that come from? The other power, the power that you gave me. That golden light. What is it?”

“I’ve always had it,” he mutters. “’S why I never was afraid of walking in the dark, here, or when I was coming here. I had a light. I could use it to get past all the things in the night.”

“Thanks, Prom. You really helped -- but I still need -- ”

He gives in, then, to the temptation to press his mouth against Noctis’s -- maybe to ground him, maybe to respond to him saying thanks -- and he mutters against that warm skin, “What else do you need from me, I’ll do it, I won’t hesitate, tell me -- ”

“Get the, the thing I was wearing, please, I’m cold.”

And how has he failed to notice that -- Noctis has at some point lost his clothes? He tries to fight off the shudder as he hears those malevolent voices once again and he -- reaches out for the item that Noctis has pointed out to him.

Heavy, beautiful weight of it in his hands: black silken material, rich and rustling when his fingers close on it. The inside is lined in mottled shades of ivory and cream; the outside is brocaded all over in swirling silver and gold in patterns that make him think of vines hooked into trellises. 

He crawls back towards Noctis and throws the robe-like thing onto his naked skin and the sheer luxurious weight of it is a surprise, as is the _second_ set of patterns, the second set of shapes woven into the vines. 

“I’ve never seen you guys wear -- vines. Or lightning-bolt shapes,” he says, and he wraps himself around Noctis, because the robe has no closures or ties or belts, because its sleeves are large enough to be oversized on Gladio, which means Noctis is more or less swimming in it.

Swimming in shimmering black and gold and silver, stark contrast against his skin, against his drying blood and the holes in him. 

“Family,” he hears Noctis offer, after a moment. “Not my dad’s. My mom’s. And my uncle’s.”

Noctis’s hands, warming quickly in both of his, and he chafes a little more heat into the silk and into Noctis’s skin. Pulls Noctis even closer, as best as he can. “You said there was another thing. You said you weren’t done.”

“I’m not.” Quiet low agreement. “But I’m not sure I know what I’m actually supposed to do, because -- you heard me, I said, I wasn’t thinking I could get this far. I was thinking I wouldn’t be able to finish. I could be killed or corrupted before -- ”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” and Prompto stumbles over the words, doesn’t care they’re close enough he’s whispering them directly onto Noctis’s throat. “I’m asking about the, the other thing. You said you still need -- what exactly?”

Noctis is coming closer, is blurring out gently, and Prompto closes his eyes and leans into the kiss before he can even really consider what he’s doing, and this time Noctis isn’t shaking like he’s about to fly apart into pain and ash.

So he opens his mouth and breathes slowly, carefully, pushing forward into Noctis, into the hands that are moving into his hair.

Into the mutter against his teeth: “I need to channel the magic that was in you. You need to -- pour it all into me so I can direct it.”

“I don’t know how to do that.” He doesn’t quite shake his head, because that kind of movement will dislodge them both from the shelter of the kiss.

“I -- do. I know how to draw it out of you. But it’s, it’s not actually something I’m _expecting_ you to do. I’m not going to demand it. I have to ask, and you decide, okay?”

“Otherwise, what, are those things that were trying to eat you actually going to eat you? Because that’s what it looked like for me. Like I couldn’t see them but I could see you, and you were getting eaten, a little, getting torn apart.”

“They’ll come back if I don’t finish the ritual. I think my uncle attempted it, too, a long time ago, and he didn’t know what the last step was, or he couldn’t find anyone with other magic to help him, I don’t know. But he failed because he didn’t go through with the last step. And that’s why they did what they did to him. Them. The Astrals.”

Astrals. 

As in -- Bahamut and all the others?

And he remembers Noctis accusing the Astrals of destroying his family.

He remembers Noctis twisting in pain, as if he had been lifted and hurt in Astral hands.

Damning words.

Damning enough to harden his resolve, and he says, “You’ll do what to the Astrals exactly, with the magic you have and the magic you want to take from me?”

“If I can make sure they’ll never come back, if I can make sure I can seal this world away from their power forever -- ”

Then it’s easy to decide, and he kisses Noctis again. “How do I give you my magic? How do you, what’s the word you used, channel it?”

“I -- Prom, don’t decide just because of me -- ”

“I think that’s more than enough to help me decide. I made you a promise. I’m not going back on it.” He grips Noctis’s hands more tightly, and he’d worry about crushing Noctis, except that Noctis is holding on to him just as fervently. “Whatever I need to do, however it needs to be done. Tell me, so we, you, can do this thing.”

And he’s left alone, suddenly, in the sense of Noctis rising from his lap and stalking to the low table. Slap of those pierced hands onto the stone -- and then Noctis is lying down on the table, on the rich material that’s draped around him. “Come here, Prom?”

It’s a question.

He knows the answer: feet on the floor, he leans over Noctis, close enough their noses are nearly touching. 

“No, I mean, here -- let me,” and again he’s moving without really understanding what’s going on -- or more precisely, he’s being moved, and when he comes to rest he’s crouching over Noctis. Hands and knees cushioned by Noctis’s robe, and their chests heaving together, touching on every breath.

“Noct.”

“Your hands, Prom.”

So he shifts his weight, and places his hands over Noctis’s chest. Feels the rising warmth of them. The closeness, thick enough he can taste it, salt and musk and copper-rust.

Noctis’s eyes wide open and resolute and clear, untouched by pain, as he says, “Join with me.”

“Noct,” he begins.

“It’s a sacred marriage, it’s a ritual marriage,” he hears Noctis add, soft and steady words. “My magic, and yours. I’m going to put them together. I can’t take the magic away from you. I have to channel it, and we can do that, but -- it’s -- you have to say some words and you have to do some things.”

It’s -- easy to understand. It’s impossible to understand.

But he sees the wary fledgling hope in Noctis’s eyes, too -- and he takes a deep breath, and leans back in. This time he presses his forehead to Noctis’s. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I only know why I’m doing it.

“Guide me?”

And that’s how he ends up naked, pressed so intimately to Noctis, and the two of them carefully wrapped in the robe, entangled in it and in each other. Noctis is speaking, but not in any language that Prompto understands; he can only do his best to copy those sounds and -- ignore the echoes created by those sounds. A different kind of invisible chorus. A different kind of prayer.

The ritual involves -- exchanging breaths. Kisses. And Prompto knows he’s trying to get closer with each kiss, feels Noctis lingering with each exchange so he knows he’s welcome, and he’s grateful for the presence of Noctis that seems to be growing stronger -- 

“Is this your magic or -- just you?”

“Same thing,” is the breathless response, Noctis’s mouth still brushing against his. “My magic and me. For this, for what we’re doing, they’re one and the same.”

“Me too?”

“Yeah.”

That makes a -- a weird kind of sense, and -- he leaves behind the last of his doubts. The last of his fears. “Take my magic, or take me, or -- whatever it is you need -- ”

“Yes,” he hears Noctis say.

“Thank you,” he hears Noctis say.

With every kiss the incredible roiling powerful presence of magic presses in on him, on them, further and heavier and -- better, he feels better and stronger and more _real_ \-- 

The last thing Prompto remembers is the triumphant shocked half-shout that bursts out of Noctis -- a shout that’s suddenly followed by a braided column of white light and gold -- the light pierces Noctis, goes right through his chest and then it goes through Prompto, too, power and strength and bright warmth of their combined magic brushing his heart and leaving him shaking and small and humbled and utterly silent --

Distantly, he thinks he hears a long low protesting crack, that rises and rises and then turns into a terrible shriek of breaking and shattering.

“Prom,” he hears, eventually.

He looks down and his gaze catches on those familiar eyes, that familiar face. The smile of Noctis, small and dazed and worn and -- alive, definitely alive, and if he can’t remember that then the entire burning-up warmth of their bodies is another reminder, where they’re pressed together, shoulders to chests to bellies to hips. Knees and feet adjoining -- and their hands still clasped between them, snug in the scant hollow space between their chests.

“Did it work? -- Are you okay?” he asks, he has to ask, and he wants to get ready to -- fight. To be angry. After everything, after all this, if they still have to deal with the Astrals -- “How do we know if it worked?”

“I’m okay. The rest, I think, I think it worked, but I’m not sure: we’d have to look at the Crystal to find out.”

He blinks, thrown. “The Crystal?”

“The whole point of this was to break the Astrals’ power, and that power is -- the Crystal,” is the quiet answer he gets. “I heard something break. I don’t know what it was.”

“I heard it too.” 

And somehow his reward is that smile, growing incrementally wider. “You did? Then -- then maybe it’s true. Maybe it worked. Maybe we did it. We, we have to find out.”

“Yeah but -- ”

In speaking, Noctis had shifted his hips and now Prompto feels the traitorous blush rise in his cheeks, all the way to -- probably -- the top of his head. Skin-contact between them, and he’s embarrassed but also he doesn’t actually want to leave Noctis, now that he’s here.

Doesn’t want to move away, because that would mean he’d stop soaking in the warmth of Noctis’s belly, and lower, too. 

But he does: he grits his teeth and closes his eyes and carefully, slowly, lifts himself back up and off of the low table. Sits on its farther edge instead. Looks away, when the robe shifts and that must mean Noctis is trying to sit up, too.

“Prom. Come here.”

Eyes still averted, he goes, because he can’t say no to Noctis, he never has been able to and he never will.

As soon as they’ve both stepped away from the stone where they’d -- performed that ritual -- it cracks, silently, and breaks into two.

But Prompto has no time to stare at it because Noctis is pulling him close, is folding him into the robe with him, arms wound sweetly around his neck, hands tangling gently into his hair, and he closes his eyes and shivers and tries to remember this, tries to imprint this into his memory -- 

“We’ve got a lot to talk about, if we’ve done it right,” Noctis is whispering to him. “You and me, I mean. Just you and me. Not the others -- not my dad or Gladio or Ignis or Luna. They’re not part of the conversation, I promise, it’ll be you and me.”

“Luna,” Prompto mutters. “What about -- this, this thing we’ve done, isn’t that going to, what about you and her?”

“What about us?”

And Noctis sounds so completely baffled that Prompto opens his eyes and stares. “Engagement. Duh.”

“Broke it. We broke it, when I found out about all this. We broke it and then we told my dad and we just kept it a secret. Not even Ignis knows, or Gladio, or anyone else in this place. Now there’s you though.” Smile, gentle, sweet, patient. 

The longer Prompto looks at that smile the more he thinks that -- Noctis looks _awake_. Vital and awake, wide-eyed alive here and now, like he’s completely here and not just -- as Prompto now understands it -- halfway to being eaten by the Astrals all the fucking time.

So maybe, maybe, he can allow himself to believe in what Noctis is saying, too: and he takes back his courage and leans in for a kiss.

“Prom,” is the happy murmur against his mouth.

He doesn’t even care when the doors burst open again and the King of Lucis walks into the room, something like concern and something like a very cautious hope engraved into all the lines of his face, followed by a ragged trail of black frock-coats and -- at the very back -- Gladio and Ignis and Iris.

Noctis laughs, and keeps him folded into the robe that they’re now sharing, and he covers up his own grin.

Keeps holding Noctis’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
